Christmas (Rome), 2012

Danh Vo is a Danish artist of Vietnamese origins. His installations and curatorial projects interweave narratives that expose the complexities of individual and collective identities. Most of the artist’s projects are based on an accumulation of materials similar to that of a collector or an archaeologist. The objects he works on and exhibits act as relics that preserve the trace of multiple identities and the memories associated with them.

In Christmas (Rome), suspended within the central space, pieces of velvet discoloured by the light over time that come from the Vatican Museums preserve the trace of the liturgical objects that were once placed on them. They reveal the fabric’s original lustre, the imprints alluding to the geometric arrangement of elaborately shaped crucifixes, chalices, ciboria, and monstrances. Appropriated by Danh Vo, these delicate membranes with their ghostly presences exist in a state of tension once they are exhibited; as an inchoate pile, they are paradoxically protected, but when they are unfurled in a space, they are inexorably exposed to the light, which leads to their slow destruction.

The Pinault Collection showed this work for the first at the Icones exhibition at Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2023